Technology

What's Up With Apple: Touching $3 Trillion, Samsung Unleashes Tiger Strategy, and More

Paul Ausick

Published: January 4, 2022 7:48 am

For just a moment on Monday, shares of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) touched $182.88, a new all-time high. That was also the price at which Apple became the world’s first company to reach a market cap of $3 trillion.

Reaching its historic $1 trillion market cap in 2018 took Apple 44 years. Two years later, in August of 2020, the company’s market cap reached $2 trillion. Apple reached the $3 trillion mark even more quickly. It took just 17 months.

Analysts Gene Munster and Doug Clinton of Loup Funds are even more bullish on Apple in 2022. They expect Apple’s moves into metaverse (mixed reality headsets) and autonomous driving will drive the company’s earnings price multiple to 35 times earnings, that Apple will post earnings per share of $7 and reach a share price of $250. All that yields a market cap of $3.8 trillion this year.

By Monday’s closing bell, the price had retreated to $182.01 and Apple’s market value had dropped to $2.986 trillion. Quel dommage! In Tuesday’s premarket, Apple stock traded above $183.00.

According to third-quarter data reported by Strategy Analytics, Samsung displaced Apple as the top North American smartphone vendor, with a share of 38% to Apple’s 37%. Counterpoint Research has Apple’s third-quarter share of the U.S. market at 47% to Samsung’s 34%. In China, Counterpoint reported that Apple had a 13% share in the third quarter while Samsung was lumped in with “Others.” Samsung’s share of the Chinese market is less than 1% and, in India, the company has given up second place to Chinese device maker RealMe.

But Samsung has a plan. According to the Korea Herald, some 40 company executives met in Las Vegas ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to discuss the company’s “Tiger” strategy for 2022:

The letters individually stand for: “True No. 1 in all product categories,” “Improve flagship market share,” narrow the “Gap between Apple,” “Expanding” the presence of products such as wireless earphones, and the firm’s determination to achieve a “Record year” by reaching its targets.

Roh Tae-moon, head of Samsung’s mobile experience, (MX) division, told the group, “Our MX vision is to shift from a smartphone vendor to an intelligent device company. We will not be a tech brand, but a brand beloved by young generations, providing innovative experience.”

Briefly noted:

A class-action antitrust case charges that Apple and Google violate U.S. antitrust law by, among other things, the companies’ agreement that Google will pay Apple some enormous amount ($12 billion in 2020, a reported $15 billion for 2021) for the right to be the default iOS search engine. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a similar suit in October of 2020.

An independent security researcher has found a vulnerability in Apple’s HomeKitAPI that can lock iPhones into a “spiral of freezing, crashing, and rebooting if a user connects to a sabotaged Apple Home device.” All it takes is for the attacker to create a HomeKit device with a name that is about 500,000 characters long.